This is my fourth paint along with Bob Ross. So far they’ve all been fun and shown me that I’m capable of more than I thought while also being rather challenging! I’m doing these on smaller canvas to give myself more leeway to be imperfect and leave out small details.
I’m still working on my happy little trees. I finally caved and got some paint thinner and actual palate knives (I was using cut outs from a plastic juice jug before. Not kidding.)
There are still a few tools I’ll need if I keep this up. Currently I’m using a mix of acrylic, oil, and… fabric paint? Just whatever I have on hand. We’ll see what I decide to treat myself with before the next painting!!
And a few words from the master himself:
And apparently I can drop youtube videos directly into wordpress so that’s nifty! Here’s the video if you want to feel a little inspired.
I took a long break from making art after I published my book in 2015.
I finished the sketchbook I had and then left its replacement untouched for months.
I remember opening the book up for the first time, and banishing the blankness from its pages. Well, from the first page. It was another six months before I opened it again. In this fashion I slowly worked, adding strange things into my works. Cat hair held down with scotch tape. Actual acrylic paint. Whatever the hell this was:
No, I’m not scanning this monstrosity, you can have a shitty phone picture.
During this time my art became unpredictable, angst-ridden, and confusing.
It’s been just over three years since that initial sketch, and I’m still discovering what went wrong, how I burned out. I’m 19 pages into that same sketchbook.
I knew I needed to stop selling art because it was becoming so much more about other people, what did they want to see? Did they like it? Were they willing to pay for it?
Some of my characters were very popular, yet some of the dearest to me were completely overlooked. The silence that met these characters felt like a rejection of a part of me.
I needed to separate myself from my art and other people’s views of it from my self-worth. I am more than the reception my art receives.
I was once a very talented musician, and the thing about being a performer is the music already exists, you just have to learn to play it. You can alter things, and express things differently, but the framework is there.
In music, you learn works by the masters, play them beautifully, record them (maybe you need to get some legal permissions if the pieces are not very old or in public domain), and you sell that, or people pay you to perform. It’s not easy, by any means. But it is rather straight forward.
That’s… Not how visual art works.
At least in my experience, you don’t want to sell art that’s all copies of great artists. Some people make it work, but it’s not the standard by far.
Furthermore my skills and understanding of myself as an artist come nowhere near what I had created as a bassoonist.
So it’s difficult not to want validation. It’s difficult to make art just for myself.
Yet I still want to make art.
So, I do make it, I keep making it, and I will continue to do so.
I’ll try to separate my self-worth from what other people think (or don’t think) about the pieces I make.
When I started this blog in 2010 I wrote a post about becoming the person you want to be, and taking the steps you need to get there. I decided to go back to that to see how much it still applies:
I can change. I have changed. I can stand my ground. I can be strong, and I can be happy. I can overcome my fears and my doubts. I can push the limits of what I think I can and cannot do. I can find out that slow persistence is still progress.
So here’s to slow persistence, here’s to overcoming, and here’s to doing things even if they scare us, and even if it takes three years to get rolling again.
Thank you for reading. Let me know below, what do you struggle with and need validation for?
This is a doodle that I did while listening to my mentor’s most recent online course on how she became a successful artist. I was doodling long before I met my mentor, but she is the first person to actually engage me in my doodling and encourage me to doodle during class. She showed me the results of a study (presented in this video at about 3:45), which found that doodlers remembered 29% more details than a control group when listening to a prerecorded message.
And thinking back on it, I always doodled in my favorite classes. Music and Art History have been by far my favorites, and my notebooks are packed with illustrations, characters, fantastical landscapes and abstractions.
Might I mention that I graduated with a 3.6 and those classes were some of the ones in which I earned my highest grades?
So perhaps there’s something to it. All I know is that every doodle I make holds a precious place in my heart, which is why I’m sharing them with you!
My challenge to you: Doodle today and post the results below! Use a pen, pencil, crayons or markers. Just put on your favorite music, show, movie, or even call a friend! Snap a photo with your phone and post it below it or email it to aj@ajmck.com with your name (or website, or however you would like to be credited) and I just might feature it as a “guest post” for you!
Doodleroo!
AJ
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The Journey 